The Condemned Fall
by Lukas Bondevik
Summary: Norway is dreaming. Despite the insensible face Norway wears every wake minute, his dreams are anything but that. They grab a hold of him and drag him downwards. The year is 1850, a Norway-Sweden Union one shot.


_The condemned fall to hell_. It's an insane view. Bodies pressed close together, falling. Had not some of the sense of touch in my fingers still remained I would not have known what arm belonged to me. And even so I am still not entirely sure the arm to my left, the one that just now lightly wriggled its little finger, belongs to me.

There is not much to see if I look around. Nothing, except for arms and legs that hopelessly flail and bustle about, like they could swim back up to the surface if they tried hard enough. A surface we can no longer see -if it had been there at all. What little I can spot here and there is too dark for me to make any sense of. Maybe are there walls around us, maybe not. I don't understand the few things I get a glimpse of in the brief flashes of light emerging from somewhere far bellow us.

Someone grabs my ankle -if it is my ankle. Something wet hits my face. Tears? We have fallen too far for any tears to remain. Rather blood, or sweat. It drips and flows. From me, on me, everywhere around. My ears crackle like busted loudspeakers. There are too many sounds. A bird cries out in the distance. Heat drags itself along my body, bodies without clothes, bodies twisted in odd, unnatural shapes.

Suddenly my neighbour's voice rings out. «_You shouldn't be so arrogant!»_ He lives at the other end of the staircase. The voice is loud, shuts everything else out as he yells it over and over again. In the back of my mind I can remember the day- it had been sunny, a warm winter's day. He had spotted me on my way to the store. I wanted ice cream; he wanted to preach me the gospel. I just wanted ice cream.

His voice is nothing but a memory, throwing its echo between my ears.

Everything is swimming before my eyes. An old lady on the bus. I was in a hurry. I had to reach the store before taking the train home. I did not help her off the bus.

Wet and dry at the same time. It's so hot it hurts. Any other feeling as disappeared. A broken leg beneath me. Is it mine? I can see faces with deep shadows. It's become lighter. We have fallen a lot further. Lighter and darker. I can no longer see the difference.

Carl Johan's street. Snow and frost, and a wind I cannot remember the sensation of. I walk down the street, past one who is trembling on the ground. The gloves have been cut off on the fingers, the cop is on the ground in front. My arms are full of warm buns and a multi coloured bag of sweets.

A shrill laughter. Heads bubble with the heat. Black singed hair lies across my eyes. It's not mine. If I look down I can see hair strung between my fingers. But I do not look down. The laughter tears through my ears, mingling with inhuman screams.

It's my laughter. Distorted. Different. As a bid's cry.

1850. That today's year. One thousand, eight hundred and fifty years since _he_ died. I can remember the priest from when I was a child. Where the brown, ugly little bible went to when I got home, I do not know. It disappeared; I didn't think about it much. The next day I took ten krones from my little brother's piggy bank to buy sweets. I didn't ask. What he did not know, would not hurt him. It was only ten krones. He was only five years.

Everywhere flares up in a red tint. It does not last for long, but long enough to throw light across open eyes and mouths that gape black. Grimaces frozen on faces that whirr around out of control, and I wonder briefly if I look just as hideous as they do. It does not really matter now. Maybe I am smiling. Maybe the red around me is blood flowing from an all too dry, cracked lip.

Eighteen fifty. Boats, planes, rifles and inventions far beyond human comprehension. Yet it is just the beginning. And I fall downwards, in-between bodies enveloped in red while more and more of my surroundings become visible and clear to my eyes. Wall-less and roof-less. Shadows and smoke. I can no longer close my eyelids.

The world spins quickly today. One takes a lot for granted. And I fall in a stream of humans tightly packed like canned herring, toward a ground I have yet to get a glimpse of. So many around me; no machine in the world would be able to count.

We don't listen to each other anymore. We have our ears crammed with the roar of machines and gunshots, and see nothing but our names on a map, and the temptation of expansion.

And I hit a ground of humans, only to see the stream above for a moment before they land on top of me and I am pushed downwards in an unbearable heat, and I wish I had given my little brother a hug before I left that day and was spirited away.

_The condemned fall to hell. _

My eyes open with a jerk. Above me the roof of Sweden's bedroom stares back at me.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: This is the translation for the Norwegian "de fordømte styrtes i helvete" story of mine. It's a school assignment thing I wrote months and months ago, translated a while ago and posted on my other account. But since it's about Norway I changed my mind, and am reposting it here. :D Please read the explanation for the story bellow, as I believe it will help you a little in understanding the story. X) <strong>

**Explanation: **

**Norway is dreaming, so nothing of what he is dreaming is «literally» through, but a mirror of his feelings and things he had gone through. **

**The year is 1850, as the dream tells us, a time when Norway was in union with Sweden. Even though the union was peaceful enough in comparison to what it could of been, Norway still wishes to be an independent country again, and he feels like he has betrayed his people because he has been in a union with others for so long. **

**All the people mention that he «ignores» is a picture of how he feels he has let his people down and his feeling of guilt. The same counts for his little brother (Iceland). He has not directly done all the things he «remembers» in his dream, but dreams turn and bend our feelings and make pictures based on them. **

**The ice cream symbolises the independence that he wants, and his «neighbour»'s (which neighbour I mean I will leave for you to find out) gospel preach is also only symbolic for something else, without Christianity having anything with the union(s) to do. **

**The part about the bible has nothing with the union to do, but is a small sidetrack seeing as Norway put aside the Norrøn mythology for Christianity, and because even though he has a state church, he is still the fourth (or so) least religious country in the world. **

**I have not mentioned everything, but if you read it again and read between the lines and beneath words, maybe you will find some of the things I have left unsaid. **

**(Also, the "we" toward the end means him, Sweden and Denmark (and every other country in general as well?)) **


End file.
